From an ancient marketplace in Athens…
December 2, 2015
A European Hyperagora?
A European Hyperagora?
… to a 'modern' supermarket.
A European Hyperagora - The Emergence of a European Public Sphere
- Is the European Union a marketplace of ideas as well as only a marketplace?
- Is there something like a European public debate?
- Are political dialogs supranationalized?
Our Project
Case Selection: Greek Bailouts
- widely discussed case
- relevant to the whole of Europe
Data Selection: Twitter Data
- interesting webscraping experience
- open platform: anyone in Europe can contribute to it
Without further work on how twitter reflects wider society, to what extent can we extrapolate our results to the "European Public Sphere"?
Research Question
What can twitter tell us about pan-European reactions to the European governance of the public-debt crisis in Greece?
What can variation across time and space in the volume of Tweets regarding the euro crisis tell us about popular engagement with the issues?
What can the content of Tweets related to the crisis tell us about the spread of public opinion on the handling of the crisis in Greece between and within countries?
Previous Research
LSE project on how Europeans interact through Twitter…
Previous Research
… looking at #ThisIsACoup trending and reactions to anouncement that agreement has been reached.
Data Gathering
we pulled together a corpus of tweets
- gathered by specifying search terms & time periods (using modified GetOldTweets)
- adding information about the users who posted the tweets (using twitteR)
- adding locations given by those users (using maqQuest and Google)
- identifying language of every tweet (using textCat)
- translating non-English tweets into English (using translateR)
Data Gathering
Data Analysis
What can twitter tell us about pan-European reactions to the European governance of the public-debt crisis in Greece?
- What can variation across time and space in the volume of Tweets regarding the euro crisis tell us about popular engagement with the issues?
Descriptive Statistics
- What can the content of Tweets related to the crisis tell us about the spread of public opinion on the handling of the crisis in Greece between and within countries?
Sentiment Analysis
Main findings: Variation Across Space
Main findings: Variation Across Time
Main findings: Variation Across Space and Time
Main findings: Sentiment Analysis
- Do we find differences in sentiment and the variance of between countries in different periods?
Austerity+Greece 2010
Austerity+Greece 2012
Austerity+Greece 2015
Daily Sentiment Averages in Greece and Germany during 2015
Is this all due to Random Chance?
We summarised average sentiment by country and period, and regressed the sentiment score on country and period dummies.
An F-test of the joint significance of the country and time dummies was significant at the 1% significance level (p = 0.0032)
Conclusions
- What can twitter tell us about pan-European reactions to the European governance of the public-debt crisis in Greece?
- What is the importance of reproducibility?
Chronology 2015
